Economic Beat

The Public-Sector Jobs Myth

The "blight" of public layoffs is more than offset by the binge in hiring before the recession. Private-sector hiring still has a way to go to catch up with public sector job gains since the year 2000.

The conventional story about the trend in government jobs goes like this: The blight of government layoffs that "exceed historical averages," to quote a New York Times article, has meant that growth of private-sector employment has been accompanied by declining employment in the public sector. Something must therefore be done to spur catch-up in public-sector jobs.

But just for starters, if the pain of layoffs is concentrated among government workers, you might expect to see it in a higher unemployment rate. In...